CHAPTER 5
I was called in to the doctor’s surgery in Bowness yet again, not Mitchell’s but our family GP, and there was one of those interesting moments where despite being the patient concerned, nobody actually speaks to you.

Parental responsibility was everything, children could sit quietly while their elders and betters made decisions that could change not their own lives but that of the child.

It was also a time of doctrine, and counter-doctrine, and mine is bigger than yours, and all the time it was people like me looking up as the alleged adults, only half realising that we were the subject of the argument. At least our doctor had the good grace to send my mother out of the room when he examined me. That reminded me of the hospital in Singapore, except that now he put gloves on to poke his finger up behind my willy, and to press down either side just above it. Then he told me to lie down on a bench with a long roll of paper covering it, there was a squelch, and before I knew what he was planning he had a finger up my bum after a cold splash there.

Picture this. A naked boy, skinny, looking about ten, lying on his side on a hard table while a much older man stuffs a finger up his arse. No explanation, no warning, just a hard digit probing my innermost parts. He grunted after a while, and pulled out, then washed his hands and sat down to make notes as I lay there still naked and shivering. After what seemed like an hour, he looked up and muttered to me.

“There’s no reason to lie there now, get dressed”

There then followed another of those conversations in which he used phrases and words like ‘bilateral’, ‘post-surgical adhesion’, ‘atrophy’, ‘carcinoma’ that my mother, as an ex-nurse, understood but that I had to memorise until I could find a dictionary to unravel.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, was explained to me, though caught Mam casting me looks of utter pity, and some years later I worked out what had been done to me, but by then the fucking butchers in Singapore were long dead, like their Japanese predecessors.

It was really quite simple. They had botched my hernia operation so badly that both of my then undescended testicles had effectively been sewn into the inguinal canals in which they dwelt until puberty called them out. As a late starter, they had still been up there, where my body was steadily cooking them to a potentially cancerous death. There were two choices available, as I found out years later, and the first was to open me up from underneath and carefully remove the adhesions, lowering my balls to their proper place and checking that they were still healthy.

There was, of course, a much simpler choice, and this was where that arsehole Mitchell came into his pomp as his arrogance and weird obsessions overrode that initial maxim of all doctors: “First, do no harm.”

I found out later, from Mam, that he had pushed and pushed her about my interests, whether I had any interest in clothes or soft furnishings, and she had given him chapter and verse. All my attempts to brighten her up with colour and light, to lift the shadows from her speedfreak eyes, were seen as evidence that I must be queer. No bastard ever, ever asked me anything, I was just a child, so what could I possibly know? Decisions were made for me in which I not only had no say, but that I was unaware were even being made. As my father continued his posting in Germany, my mother sank further into her little glass friend, and turds like Mitchell must have thought all their Christmases had arrived at once.

And day by day, people like the Armstrong brothers, and Eddy Charlton, were leaving me incapable of any rational thought.

I have to explain something here. I was fascinated by the story I had read in Singapore, and I was unaware that my mother had noticed my little obsession. I had fantasised about having my own operation, and being a girl, but in my heart of hearts what I knew was that I simply wanted to escape the horrors of being a boy. Being a boy meant pain, daily torment, and being a girl instead seemed to offer a way out of that nastiness. I have read so many accounts of those poor folk who were that oddity, like April, a woman or man stuck in anatomy that was profoundly wrong, who looked in the mirror each day and wept. That wasn’t me.

I didn’t look down at myself each time I stood at the toilet and feel sick, I didn’t spend my time trying on Mam’s clothes and wanting my own breasts, I just wanted to be normal and free from persecution.

So, of course, they went for the simpler procedure, the one that fitted in with what they assumed were my desires, as perceived by fucking Mitchell, and two months after my diagnosis I was taken to the hospital yet again, and this time the funky little procedure was called bilateral orchidectomy.

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For the benefit of anyone reading this, I am sorry if I lapse into ranting every now and again, but the seventies were still full of jumped-up little oddities who each had a pet theory that they applied to every patient they had. They seemed to work on the bass that if it didn’t work on this patient, it would on the next, and by the time they had established enough of a sample to show others that they were talking rubbish, the subjects had been destroyed. Each subject, of course, was a human being, but in their hubris they knew better than God.

Can I hate? Yes, indeed. Do I hate? Oh, deary me, yes, and I just wish the people in question were still alive so I could return the favours they did to me.

So, I woke once more from surgery down there, and this time it hurt even more, with two incisions in my groin. Mam was there, and Dad was apparently due back in a couple of days, and how I wished he had been there to stop them cutting into me, and I cried at the pain and the nausea and, if you can believe this, at the time, still, NOBODY had told me what they were doing.

Mam smelt of gin again. When she came back the next day she had Nana with her. I cried again, this time with relief, and I noticed there was a real tension between them, perceptible even to a drugged-up thirteen year old. The following evening, my Dad appeared, still in uniform, and he left Nana with me after a hug and dragged my mother out of the ward. I could hear the nose of the argument, but not the words, and when they came back in he nodded sharply to the door and took Nana out. That was a lot quieter, and as Mam just sat and cried, those two came back in.

“Stevie, we’re going to have a few changes once you’re well. I‘ve been talking to your Nana, and it’s clear you’re not happy at Anthorn.”

I couldn’t speak, I just shook my head. Nana took my hand.

“How’d tha like to come and live wi me in Boot?”

I just nodded. Finally there was hope, finally I could escape the Armstrongs, Charlton, Woggy, Anthorn…I was released from hospital after around a week, and as Mam drove me back to the grey house by the muddy shore I was dreaming of days running the fellsides and listening to the Ravens, as Herdwicks scattered before me and this leathery old darling.

Iain was solicitous, as much as an eleven year old obsessed with football can be, and spent the best part of a fortnight only able to sleep on my back, but having to get up every hour or so to walk around trying to ease the pain.

I filled my days with reading, and trying to catch up on schoolwork brought over for me by the twins, who actually seemed to be worried about me. One day Emma produced her make up mirror, and showed me my face. I looked like a famine victim; the only thing missing was the grossly distended stomach I had seen on news reports from Biafra. I was far from well, although physically I was healing, and still nobody had explained what exactly they had done to me, which puzzled me as I could still feel no balls down there.

I packed as best I could for the move to Nana’s, mostly books, it seemed, happily leaving the school blazer hanging in my wardrobe, and then two days before I was due to be driven down there somebody knocked at our front door.

There were two of them, a man and a woman, both in khaki with red on the tops of their caps, whom I recognised as Military Police. The woman smiled at me.

“Hello, young lady, is your mother in?”

“I’m not a girl. I’ll get her. MAM!!”

She took them into the lounge, and I noticed she was shaking. The door was shut, and after a couple of minutes I crashed through it as I heard her scream. She was sobbing and hysterical, and she clutched at me as the woman MP patted her arm and the man went to the kitchen and filled the kettle.

Dad had been on exercise, ‘scheme’ as he called it. The tree he had been standing beside had survived being brushed by the rear of the turning Chieftain tank. Dad hadn’t.